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Bruce Chatwin’s formative In Patagonia is inspiring, not only because of the alluring wilderness the book focuses on, but because the book itself defies all the tropes of its genre. You’d be hard-pressed to call this just ‘travel writing.’ Think more…fictionalised non-fiction, with a significant focus on space, place and the distinction between the two.…

I finished “One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich” in a rapid two days, caught up in the Kazakhstan snowstorm that is this novel. A scarcity of language that matched the bare exposure of the gulag system, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s controversial work gave me a new light on how much can be said with very little.…

Six inches across, shaped like a banana. The cut runs from the woman’s neck, between her breasts, towards her navel. If I wanted I could peel the skin back and reveal her rib-cage. There’s no blood on her skin, no blood on the sand: she’s clean, clean all over, veins visible in her arms and…

My first book is finished and comes in at 84,000 words. I’m trying to print it out, but it’s a hassle. You can read the introduction to the book here. Whilst I’m waiting for the book to stew over, and build up enough patience to print 256 A4 pages, I’ve started another project. This is…

I’d rather not tell you my name, if that’s okay with you. This story isn’t about me. It’s about Espen Stengard, who was born in 1994 in a shitty little town in Kent, which is in the South East of England, not far from the throbbing heart of the old empire. This was the year…

When I was younger and grew up reading mostly fantasy (Magician by Raymond E. Feist is one of my all-time favourites) I didn’t pay attention to a lot. I just loved the magic, the dragons, the story. Looking back, when reading Magician for a fifth time, I noticed that the first line is objectively dull. The…

Roth’s “The Plot Against America” must’ve struck the average reader as pertinent when it was first published in 2004, given the growth of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflict, but nothing had prepared me for how shockingly the plot of this alternative-history novel reflects modern American society. Perhaps I am placing too much importance on my own…